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I would like to request a pie chart to see how a user got his or her reputation. This could be placed on the profile page. Sections could contains percentages like:

14 Questions - 200 points - 28.41%
20 Answers   - 400 points - 56.82%
 2 Edits     -   4 points -  0.57%
 1 Bonus     - 100 points - 14.20%

Reputation

Image: artist rendering of a pie. It does not have to look this way. It might even be a chart per tag or even per topic .

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    Can you elaborate on what the pie chart would show? What would its sections be about? – Pekka supports GoFundMonica Oct 24 '12 at 13:27
  • @Pekka There are only so many ways to get rep - up vote on question, up vote on answer, having an answer accepted, accepting an answer, submitting an edit for review, and I think I'm missing one or two. – Thomas Owens Oct 24 '12 at 13:29
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    I imagine: take data displayed on meta.stackoverflow.com/users/id?tab=reputation ; group by event type; sum within groups; make pie. Not sure how events bestowing negative rep would work though. No one wants a negative pie slice. – AakashM Oct 24 '12 at 13:29
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    I guess the negative rep would be humble pie – Ben Brocka Oct 24 '12 at 13:31
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    @AakashM it should show reputation, negative points make your rep lower... but it does not have to be something that is visible in the chart. – Kees C. Bakker Oct 24 '12 at 13:31
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    A clearer outline of whether a user's rep comes from mainly questions or answers wouldn't be such a dumb thing IMO. It doesn't have to be a pie chart, but showing the basic info might make sense. Unless I'm mistaken, that information is not readily available at the moment – Pekka supports GoFundMonica Oct 24 '12 at 13:34
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    That would be helpful. Maybe a chart by tag and a rep by rep increase type – Chris Gerken Oct 24 '12 at 13:34
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    You could choose to omit negative rep changes, or view the absolute value of the negative reputation changes (that are not the results of reversing a positive reputation change, say, from the deletion of a question). This is commonly done in pie charts for say, exposure of a position in finance, where the positive and negative isn't as important as the amount. I'd opt for that here, as I want to see the impact of all events on reputation, I don't need the aggregate number. That's the point of a visualization like this. – casperOne Oct 24 '12 at 13:55
  • wonder how offered bounties would be reflected in such a chart... would these? – gnat Oct 24 '12 at 14:06
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    @gnat would be great to see how any point is scored (also the bonus en edit-reps). Problem might be with offering reputation... because you have actually scored something but you gave it away (from total score). – Kees C. Bakker Oct 24 '12 at 14:09
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    If we really have to do it, I'd suggest not using a tilted semi-transparent colored 3D pie chart. The main reason is that... the areas are not faithfully represented. You can't even properly see the 0.57% part. Why not a good ol' plain one? Or another graph? Or a simple text table with percentages? – Alenanno Oct 25 '12 at 11:18
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    @KeesC.Bakker Ah it's just an example? I thought you were proposing something like that. I think that will influence how others see the question by the way. :) – Alenanno Oct 25 '12 at 11:24
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    See also meta.stackexchange.com/questions/40141/… – ChrisF♦ Oct 25 '12 at 15:54
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    @Alenanno, I've added a disclaimer on the image ;-) – Kees C. Bakker Oct 26 '12 at 7:20
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    I was just thinking: how many upvotes does a question need to have to be implemented? – Kees C. Bakker Oct 28 '12 at 21:05
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I created a short script that gets a given user's public reputation changes and sum them by type. I published it as a gist.

It outputs the result as a tab-separated list that you can put into spreadsheet-creator-of-your-choosing and create the pie (or any other) chart.

The script uses the /users/{ids}/reputation-history Stack Exchange API endpoint.

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26

Although this may not be terribly useful to implement in Stack Exchange, it would make a great Stack App. Get busy!

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  • Can those apps be integrated on / plugged in the SO site? – Kees C. Bakker Oct 25 '12 at 10:12
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    @KeesC.Bakker Not AFAIK, but if you create an app, and there is lots of interest, it increases the chance of SE directly implementing it. – Kendall Frey Oct 25 '12 at 12:47
  • While that may be true, it would be difficult to implement without knowing each rep-type quantity out of the whole. I don't know the Stack Exchange API, but does it offer that kind of functionality? – Madara Uchiha Oct 26 '12 at 8:43
  • @MadaraUchiha, good question... AFAIN you can get a list of all the points, but the trick is to categorize them. – Kees C. Bakker Nov 13 '12 at 7:48
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I don't know. There is a lot of potential for misuse of such a system. There are quite a few people who consider those who have more questions than they do answers to be a drain on the site. Some consider people who got a lot of rep from editing to not have truly earned it.

The last thing we want is to make it easier for people to denigrate others in this way. We should not care how someone got their rep; they got it. It's theirs. If certain avenues of reputation are "worse" than others, then the correct solution is to either reduce or remove the rep gained from them. Otherwise, you shouldn't care. And if you do, that's something that should be fixed.

Rep should be source-neutral.

And we don't want to have another "accept rating" stat (a stat so abused, it's an informal rule that you can't even talk about it in comments). We want stats that foster competition and achievement, not division.

Plus, profile pages have enough stuff on them; they don't really need another stat.

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    Much like other people don't see your entire profile, complete with your flag reports, and downvotes, you could make that feature available to the user only. – Madara Uchiha Oct 26 '12 at 8:44
  • You could use anything for evil... but I think it might be a nice way to show some extra stats. – Kees C. Bakker Oct 26 '12 at 13:05
  • There are quite a few people who consider those who have more questions than they do answers to be a drain on the site. Actually, you already know that, just by looking at my profile, this would just summarize all of the information. And if someone starts denigrating other users for that, just let a moderator know about it. – Alenanno Oct 27 '12 at 16:26
  • Well, a good question is - IMO - just as valuable as a good answer. – Kees C. Bakker Oct 28 '12 at 8:19
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    -1 because although this is a very well-written answer, it doesn't make much sense to me due to what Madara said. This doesn't need to be "public" at all. – Lightness Races with Monica Oct 30 '12 at 19:07
  • @LightnessRacesinOrbit, but it could be public after you've got a certain rep... there are a lot of ways to do this feature... – Kees C. Bakker Nov 1 '12 at 15:10
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    @Kees: It's certainly possible, but it's not the case that we shouldn't have this feature because of that possibility. – Lightness Races with Monica Nov 1 '12 at 17:53

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